This exploratory study examines the communication media choice of managers. Despite a substantial body of theories on media choice, inadequacies are apparent in the literature particularly in relation to modem communication technologies. A field study approach was adopted to explore some of these inadequacies and to study the media choice of subject from a manager background. Overall, within the limitations and confines of this exploratory study, this thesis has made the following contributions. First, this thesis identifies and has demonstrate at the unduly narrow focus on task equivocality in prior media choice studies has undermined the study's ability to explain the observed media choice. There is a need to consider the full range of task characteristics in explaining the communication media choice process. Second, Information Richness Theory( IRT) has enjoyed acceptance information systems researchers throughout the last decade,b ut recent unfavourable empirical evidence has precipitated a shift away from it and a search for a new theory. The application of social interaction theories responded to the problem of media richness/social presence by postulating that media selection, like most tasks in organisations, is influenced by a combination of social forces. This means that , while the media richness/social presence scale matching tasks with media would apply in most cases, it is perfectly predictable that some groups or individuals will define either tasks or media traits differently, thus explaining the problems with media richness/social presence theories. Third, drawing together ideas in the literature a broad overview of the media choice process is developed into a comprehensive framework model. A novel aspect of this framework is, to find whether Information richness and Social interaction theories directly influence media choice; or the Social interaction theories influence media choice indirectly through the Information richness theory.

During the past two decades, the trend towards diversification by large corporations in the advanced industrialised nations has been a transition from diversification to specialisation. However, there is little evidence of these same trends being duplicated in the emerging-market countries. Are large business enterprises in the emerging market countries slow in responding to the new strategic logic or is there some justification for such discrepancy'? The study provides the rationale to support a contingency theory of diversification. Diversification strategy is an outcome of not only a firm's resource base and the characteristics of industries, but also depends upon the level of development and transactional efficiency of resource markets within the country and the role of inter-firm collaboration. The study follows a resource-based approach to corporate strategy. The study is based on a qualitative case study approach. The empirical analysis is based on two levels. First, I examined the overall diversification strategies of the 20 largest Thai business groups. Second, I conducted detailed case studies of the diversification decisions of three Thai business groups focusing specifically upon diversification into the telecommunications sector. The case studies are constructed around three companies that diversified into the telecommunications industry in Thailand during the same period. Data from another 13 diversifying companies and five public organisations also provide additional sources of empirical evidence. The empirical evidence shows that diversification into a business which may not be operationally related to the core business -a concept which has lost favour in many of the Anglo-Saxon countries - makes strategic sense in the business environment of the emerging market countries. Essentially, the 'general' theory of diversification holds true in many cases. The key is a) to recognise the different characteristics of markets for resources and the strategic resources in different parts of the world, and b) to understand that strategic resources do not depend on just availability of resources in the market and internal resources within the firm, but also the role of inter-firm collaboration. Differences in business environment raises the question of whether a single diversification strategy is universally applicable.

Modern business has made it necessary for International Accounting Standards to be developed, so that we can achieve harmonisation. Accounting has been transmitted in accounting practices from one country to another, generating a specific international accounting system that exhibits both similarities and differences with local accounting practices. The adoption of IAS to the Kuwaiti environment started in 1990. This puts Kuwait among the countries, which implemented IAS at its early stage. This study focuses primarily on measuring accountants', auditors', and external users' attitudes towards using IAS in Kuwait and its consequent difficulties.

An important part of this study is the attempt to reconcile the contradictory findings about mergers and acquisitions reported in the financial economics and the industrial economics literatures. This is done by using both share price and accounting data, an approach not used in previous work. Financial economics characterises the market for corporate control as rival management teams competing for control over corporate assets. Takeovers represent a necesssary external discipline, whereby inferior management is displaced by those with superior management skills. Using share price data, most empirical studies support this characterisation and mergers as efficiencyenhancing transactions. In contrast, studies in the industrial economics literature have used accounting data to show that acquiring firms do not exhibit superior pre-merger performance and that mergers generally result in a decline in profitability post-merger. Results from the first phase of the empirical work tends to support the latter view, with a certain degree of compatibility between results with accounting data and those with share price data. At this stage the disciplinary hypothesis is not supported. Another important part of this study investigates the impact of business and merger cycles on merger outcomes at the level of the firm. This work is prompted by the failure of previous studies to take account of the empirical literature on the modelling of merger cycles. The importance of calendar time is confirmed by the results obtained. The full 1980-90 sample incorporates different phases of the business and merger cycles and the results with both accounting and share price data for this period are similar but rather inconclusive. I lowever, when the sample is divided to reflect different phases of the business and merger cycles a very different picture emerges. In the period 1980-85 when takeover activity was low and competitive pressures in product markets were intense, acquiring firms on average appeared to adopt strategies consistent with the disciplinary hypothesis and delivered wealth gains to shareholders. In contrast, during 1986-90, when merger activity was at record levels and the economy was in an expansionary phase, shareholders of acquiring firms suffer substantial wealth losses, consistent with managerialist strategies. The accounting results corroborate these share price findings: they show that relative to targets and industry norms acquirers in the first sub-sample exhibited superior performance, consistent with the disciplinary hypothesis, while those in the second sub-sample did not. These empirical results also provide an opportunity in the last part of the thesis to examine current UK merger policy. The time dependent nature of private returns suggests that mergers can be both a symptom and a remedy for agency problems. To the extent that such problems have implications for competition and economic efficiency, the results suggest that major shifts in policy are not warranted. However, the results for 1986-90 do suggest that there is a need to redress the information asymmetry between management and shareholders by extending the information disclosure provisions of the City Code. In public policy terms, increasing the information available to the shareholders of acquiring firms could have the desirable property of reducing the number of mergers that destroy value and reduce economic efficiency.

The focus of the work here was an empirical analysis of the aggregate independent demand behaviour for spare parts inventories, principally in the automotive industry. In particular, using the pioneering work of RG Brown (1959), who showed that inventory usage values are often log normally distributed, we set out and developed models that go some considerable way to explaining the underlying stochastic basis for this phenomena, why it occurs and some limiting conditions. The justification for this approach was on the grounds that by providing a more fundamental understanding of the underlying stochastic processes that explain the emergent aggregate demand behaviour, a sound starting point would be provided for developing more sophisticated analytical ways to view an inventory range, as a total entity, for planning and control purposes. The analysis was based on extensive data collected from the DAF Trucks (GB) Ltd. spare parts systems spanning the period 1975 to 1986, together with supporting studies from a number of other systems. The analysis showed that in the systems studied spare parts prices are lognormally distributed and this is most likely to be the result of a stochastic process known as the 'theory of breakage'. Analysis also showed that in the DAF Trucks case aggregated and volumes in very short time periods are distributed as a combined Log Series /Negative Binomial distribution (LSD/NBD). The combined LSD/NBD model of aggregate demand volumes is itself fully explained by a stochastic model known as the Afwedson model, which in turn is derived from more elementary conditions based on the Poisson process. We then demonstrated that if these short period aggregate demand distributions are cumulated period by period they converge to a log normal distribution as the stable long run model of aggregate demand volumes. As a result of the lognormality of prices and volumes the resultant inventory usage values are also log normal. Furthermore from insight into the underlying factors that explain the lognormality we have identified the factors and variables that govern the valueso f the parameterso f the particular log normal models of usage values. - The research protocol used in this work incorporated the law verifying process know as 'retroduction' after work and discussions of Uji Ijiri and Herbert Simon (1977); and to a lesser extent we utilised simulation for validation and verification of the derived models. From the proven log normality of demand volumes and usage values we have demonstrated that a number of related key inventory factors are also lognormal, in particular inventory- item turnover rates. Furthermore our conclusions show that some standard inventory performance measures, such as the inventory wide 'stock turnover rate' and the 'stock to sales' ratio, are poor measures to use in the case of highly skewed inventory variables. Finally we have suggested several potentially fruitful areas for developing improved methods of monitoring inventory performance in a variety of circumstances.

Issues on commitment have captured the great interest of organizations and research scholars. The health-service organizations in Singapore are anxious to develop appropriate organizational strategies to enhance their nursing personnel's levels of commitment to the organization and profession, and hope that this may, in one way or other, help to ease the turnover among the nurses currently taking place in the organizations. The current study has, therefore, been carried out to investigate the commitment levels of nurses in the health-service organizations in the Asian Context of Singapore with an attempt to (a) establish the differences between the nurses' level of organizational commitment and professional commitment; (b) determine the effects of the nurses' personal variables on their organizational commitment; and (c) ascertain the relationships between the nurses's overall job satisfaction and their organizational commitment and professional commitment. A total of 2,424 usable questionnaires were collected from nurses in six government hospitals and four private hospitals. The results of the data analysis have indicated that (a) the nurses, irrespective of their organizational affiliation to the public or private sector, tended to show a higher level of commitment to the profession than to the organization; (b) the nurses in the private hospitals did not tend to show more commitment to the organization than their counterparts in the government hospitals; (c) the personal variables of age, tenure and salary level of the nurses in both the government and private hospitals seemed to have created an impact on their organizational commitment, and that of these variables, salary level seemed to have the greatest impact on the organizational commitment, and have an intervening effect on the relationships between age and tenure and the organizational commitment; and (d) the overall job satisfaction of the nurses in the government hospitals seemed to have been related more to their professional commitment than to their organizational commitment, but the overall job satisfaction of the nurses in the private hospitals did not appear to have significant relationships either with their organizational commitment or professional commitment. The possible contributing factors to these findings were analysed;the implications for the health-service and other organizations concerned, and the implications for future studies were discussed.

The objective of this thesis is to consider the role of securitisation undetaken by firms in the financial sector by looking at five different questions related to securitisation. The thesis begins with a comparison of the institutional and market characteristics of securitisation in the US and Europe. The wide gap in their respective securitisation growth rates may be attributed to the presense of US government subsides to securitisation, and more restrictive aspects of banking regulation. After a review of theoretical and empirical work, the thesis addresses a key question: in the absense of subsides, why do depository institutions securitise? Employing UK data, the validity of two hypothesis are tested. These are the comparative advantage hypothesis which treats securitisation as evidence of disinter mediation and the financing hypothesis which argues that depository institutions use securitisation to raise finance. The third question is which banks raise external finance by securitising assets and what are the consequences for shareholder wealth? The role of securitisation in a bank's optimal capital structure is explored. Fourth, the thesis looks at whether there are differences in the pricing behaviour of financial firms which originate assets to finance them through securitisation, and depository institutions which use a variety of funding sources. Finally, the factors which influence the price of asset-backed securities at issue and in the secondary markets are examined. The main findings from the econometric tests are UK data show the financing hypothesis to be superior.

This research is concerned with the subject of Human Resource Accounting (HRA) and how two particular HRA models may be operationalized. The two models concerned are the "Stochastic Rewards Valuation Model" and the "Replacement Cost Model". The research takes the form of three case exercises in which managers from different organisations used a computerized simulation model to assist them in their employee resourcing. In the process of using this simulation figures were obtained that could operationalize the two HRA models under consideration. These figures and the managers explanation for heir computation and application are used to compare the two HRA models and to evaluate their utility. The conclusions drawn are that whilst managers implicitly hold human resources to have value, in the normally accepted nontechnical sense, the two HRA models do not provide a consistent way of measuring it. Whilst the models themselves may therefore have limited utility it was however concluded that the process of operationalising them is seen to be useful.

In this thesis we put forward two approaches to the measurement of the cost efficiency of firms in which adjustment costs affect the optimal allocation of factor inputs. The two approaches we consider are, first, based o n direct calculation of an efficiency index and, second, the estimation of a parametric model. The implementation of both approaches require extensions to the existing theory. In developing the cost efficiency index approach we suggest that the Tornqvist index can be extended to be "exact and superlative" (Diewert (1976)), even when there are adjustment costs. However, the formulae for this index becomes dependent on the unknown adjustment cost function and this needs to be estimated in reduced form by econometric methods. We find an extension of the parametric model approach that incorporates adjustment costs to be preferable, since it gives a greater understanding of the structure of adjustment costs - not only their direct influence on the costs of firms, but also the extent to which they alter the optimal factor demands (a feature that in a static model might be interpreted as allocative inefficiency). The empirical analysis in this thesis applies both approaches to estimate efficiency differences between firms, and over time, in the UK retail banking and building society sectors. The parametric model we develop, incorporating adjustment costs, is particularly appropriate since these sectors have undergone considerable change over the period we study (1978 to 1987), in terms of both the level of output and optimal factor demands (with labour substituted for progressively more computer and information technology equipment). Furthermore, the parametric approach is easily adapted to deal with other particular characteristics of these sectors. In particular, we are able to extend our model to freely estimate equipment depreciation rates. This results in using an unbiased estimate of the user cost of equipment when estimating cost efficiency.

This report places the Regular Commissions Board in its historical context, considers the previous validation research into the Regular Commissions Board and the War office Selection Boards, outlines the current officer selection and training procedures, and then describes the research methodology. The research analyzes the validity, utility and fairness of the Regular Commissions Board as a method for the selection of army officers. The research suggests that the Regular Commissions Board is moderately predictive of training and regimental performance, although little direct evidence is found that the Board is able to validly identify those who will be able to lead a platoon after training. It is estimated that the Regular Commissions Board is cost-effective though perhaps not necessarily cost-efficient. It is concluded that whilst there is some evidence of adverse impact against State educated schoolboys the Regular Commissions Board appears to be an acceptably fair selection mechanism. After a discussion of the findings, the conclusions and recommendations made to the Secretary of State for Defence are reported. These include the consideration of a mechanism which will provide the various parts of the army involved in the assessment and training of young officers with objective information on the qualities required and knowledge of success in identifying and developing such qualities; the introduction of a system of routinised validation; an investigation into the nature of the evidence available to Board members; and the need to assess the validity and fairness of the Board against more objective and independent criteria. Finally, some reflections and wider implications of the research for selection theory and practice are discussed. These include the value of assessment centres, the limitations of traditional validation as a catalyst for change and of validity and dollar utility as indicators of satisfactoriness and benefit, and the frequent insensitivity of social science conclusions and recommendations to alternative statistical assumptions.